Predictable Success with Scott Ritzheimer

george grombacher 0:00
Come on what leopard This is Georgie and the time is right to welcome today’s guest strong a powerful Scott Retimer. Scott, are you ready to do this?

Scott Ritzheimer 0:18
I am ready, George excited about it.

george grombacher 0:20
Excited about it for sure myself, let’s go. Scott is a CEO of scale architects, their organization, helping other organizations achieve predictable success by pairing them with a scale architect to build and sustain success. Scott, tell us a little about your personal life some more about your work and why you do what you do.

Scott Ritzheimer 0:43
Yeah, I have the opportunity to do what I absolutely love doing, which is a lot of fun to say, I’ve been in and out of that throughout my life did a lot of really fun things. Did you know In a surprisingly short amount of time had a whole lot of experience during my way. But now I can say being able to be there helping coaches coach and also helping leaders in the room with their teams, building remarkable organizations, there’s just nothing like it. So I absolutely adore it, everything about what I do is just so fun. But it comes out of a very painful place in my story. And that was, you know, back in my early 20s, I kind of happened into being an entrepreneur, it wasn’t really intentional, it wasn’t really what I designed, I wasn’t the quintessential guy like selling candy on the playground, you know what I mean? But looking back, now those roots, were always there. So 20 years old, and I become an owner in a company that was once a multi million dollar company and brought to the brink through a bad sale actually, and we don’t have to get into that story. But here I am owner of this company helping lead it and I don’t know anything, right? It’s just no nothing at all. But um, you know, full of piss and vinegar and ready to go. And so let’s just figure it out. And, and that’s what we did, we figured it out. And that’s what most entrepreneurs do, right? Starting an organization is 80% chance of success. So by and large, you’re doing a dumb thing to start any organization. Now I love entrepreneurs, I’m in it, I’ve done it. But it’s you know, when you look at the odds, there’s there’s better chances, right, there’s better probabilities. And so what happens is, we get used to going against the grain, we get used to ignoring sound advice, because you have to to start an organization, you just do, right, you have to ignore the advice that says, you know, play it safe. And instead you make the big bet. And, and some of them don’t work. But the ones that do are what get you out and what they did for me. And what I see happening again, and again, particularly for entrepreneurs, but for leaders in general, is it starts to affirm this idea that if I’m going to do it, I need to figure it out. And what that led for me to believe particularly a CEO of this organization at such a young age, and again, I see this in so many people now is immense. If I was going to figure it out, I had to do it myself. And, and what that translates to, and what a lot of us think is to be a CEO is to be alone. Right? It’s lonely at the top is the phrase that you hear all the time. And, and what I discovered after a very long period of time, so 10 years of my life, I spent in this mode of just feeling stuck, if I couldn’t figure it out, I had no solution, I had no way out. And that was compounded by a couple of bad coaching relationships that I tried. And they were great people, it was just for what I found are actually nearly universal reasons. We kept bumping into these challenges with folks. And it had more to do with the way that I was selecting a coach than then those coaches in general. We can talk about that in a minute. But what I realized in coming out of that I successfully sold the business, it was a great transition to the next level layer of leadership and, and I realized I wanted to help people do what I did. I was you know, still relatively young, this is all happening before I’m 35. And so it’s not necessarily your quintessential coach either. And I have the opportunity now of coaching people who are much older than me, and you know, arguably much wiser than me, but I found my niche, and I found the thing that I love and is very helpful for them. But when I was coming out of that, I was like, Okay, I want to help coach people, right, which meant I had to figure out this whole coaching thing. Why does it break so many times? And was this just an experience that I had? Or is this happening all over the place? And over the last couple of years, I’ve had the opportunity to interview about 200 different coaches, about the same number of CEOs. And if you ask a CEO if you’ve had a bad coaching relationship, my experience has been 10 out of 10 Say yes.

Unknown Speaker 4:57
100 out of 100 right every one of them Now, some of them have had great coaching experiences as well. But why is it that that’s so universal? Why is it that, you know, business coaching is a multi billion dollar industry? Especially if you bring in consultants, that’s a, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars? Why is it that it’s so broken? Why is it that it’s not working? Well, I’ve been watching the Olympics this week. And you know, the very first thing that every athlete does, the last person they see, and the first person they see after their run is their coach. Right? But in business, it’s almost like if you hire a coach, it’s like remediate, is that you did something wrong, or it’s broken. And so what’s the stigma? What is all of this? Why is the coaching industry so broken? And I realized, it really boils down to three things that have to do with how we select a coach, right? First off, I would say, alone takes a long time, everyone needs a coach, right? Whether you’re at the top of your game, or you’re just starting out, or you’ve been, you know, through the wringer, a coach will do remarkable wonders, and just helping you move forward faster to see your blind spots to, to have those just Lightning in a Bottle moments where all of a sudden that hits you and you’ve got that way to move forward. A great coach will do that again and again and again. But how do you find a great coach, right? Because the statistics are telling us that we’re not doing a great job at that. And it’s because no one’s ever been trained to do it. The if you look, there’s lots of resources on how to hire great employees, lots of them, there are entire industries dedicated to helping you recruit and find great employees, how many resources do you know of off the top of your head of finding a great coach?

george grombacher 6:30
I don’t think any. Yeah, no,

Unknown Speaker 6:32
it’s just something that we kind of take for granted. And so what we’re left to do is we’re, we’re left to try and figure it out on our own. And you know, the first time you do something, are you great at it or bad at it? Not awesome. Yeah, it’s just not, we’re not good. And that’s not a problem, right? If if we stopped things that we weren’t good at, none of us would be walking or riding bikes or talking at this point. So it’s okay to be bad at something. But what we really need is someone to come alongside and train us. And that’s what I have the opportunity to do now. And in doing that, I found that there are three issues that that tend to drive these problems. The first one is when we’re looking for a coach, we go out and we look for someone who’s who’s going to give us the silver bullet, our brains are wired to find the easiest route to a solution. And so because of that, our brains try to tell us that whatever the problem is that we’re having is a simple one, right? It may be I just need more sales, or I just need to hire better, or I just need something or the other. If you don’t have a coach or haven’t had a coach, then I can almost guarantee that whatever that symptom is, it’s just a symptom. And if you solve that, more often than not, it makes the problem worse. This happened to a gentleman I worked with his name was Paul, and he spent $40,000 on a consultant to help him with some hiring and development issues. And he lost $800,000 because of it. And what happened was, he had brought someone in to solve a problem that was not the core problem. And And long story short, once he realized this, the problem was, he needed a whole new method for doing business a whole new way of generating revenue. He couldn’t just patch a bandaid on what existed already. And once he found that, and we were able to discover that together, he was able to turn it around, added a million dollars to his bottom line in one year. And a big part of what was going on was he was having to travel about 100 nights a year to keep his business afloat. And so we were able to cut his travel to zero and add a million dollars to his bottom line. Notice top line is bottom line by addressing the root issues that existed at the time. And And again, if you’ve not been taught how to discover that, how do you know what the root issues are? Right? It When do you go to the doctor, you don’t go and say I have this underlying disease, you say my toe hurts, right? And, and so again, it’s not that anyone’s doing anything wrong. And if you go to someone say my toe hurts, and they offered to fix it, they’re not doing anything wrong, either. It’s just that there’s a mismatch in Neither party has really taken the responsibility to find that root issue and address it first. And so if you’re not already working on root issues in your organization, and you’re feeling the symptoms, and you go to just try and solve those symptoms, you may very well find someone who can solve them. But I’m, I’m pretty sure it’s going to either not change the situation fundamentally. Or, like In Paul’s case, it’s gonna make matters worse. And so addressing those root issues is really the biggest one. And then there’s a couple others as well.

george grombacher 9:36
Nice. Well, I certainly appreciate that. It’s we are conditioned to want to just take care of the symptoms. And to your point find the easiest possible that there’s a pill that can make me feel better than I’m interested in taking that pill and then kind of moving on with my day and and why would I know how to select a coach anymore than I know Know how to select a doctor, I don’t I don’t know how to do that I select my doctor via whoever my health insurance company says that I can talk to so. So all that certainly makes sense. And the stakes are as high with my doctor as they are with a coach, and probably more so with the coach because I’m actually coming out of pocket directly to pay them. So yes,

Unknown Speaker 10:18
and they’re not cheap, right. And it’s not because they’re rolling in it, most coaches really struggle to make a living, great people, great coaches ton to offer. But starting a coaching business is very, very difficult. It’s just like starting any other business, eight out of 10 coaches fail. And so a lot of what I do is work with coaches to overcome those challenges so that they can offer the better advice that that our founders and leaders need. But, you know, again, on their side, this is not to say that coaches are bad people, or that they’re stealing people’s money or anything like that. They’re just trying to put food on the table, right. And they’re trying to do what they know how to do best. And, and again, it’s just one of those things that we’ve got to both sides of the equation need to work on, on their role in what we’re contributing. And, and that’s what I that’s what I do, you know, I help both sides of that equation, I help folks find the right coach for the right time. I also help coaches to say, hey, here are the things that are holding you back that are preventing you from finding the folks that you can help at the right time. Right, here’s what’s causing you to go after that silver bullet promise, and and what to do about it.

george grombacher 11:23
Is it that you through your personal experience and your business experience, we’re able to develop a framework is a

Unknown Speaker 11:32
Yeah, so I discovered a framework, I did not develop it. So as I was working through this, this organization, we’re building it up, we get stuck in this. It’s actually a stage that every organization goes through. It’s one that I now using this framework called Whitewater. And it’s what only it only happens to successful organizations. That’s the craziest thing about it is this this highly problematic period, where you know, it’s the things that were working, the levers that you used to pull just aren’t working anymore. And I could go on and on about that. But I’m going to try and keep it brief here, for the sake of the audience, but but this whitewater period was was just crushing our organization, a revenue was still going up, but we were keeping less and less and less and less of that every year. And and no matter what we tried, we could not turn it around. And so we’re sitting there, you know, trying to figure out what to do. And it was a podcast like this, I heard a gentleman named les McKeown is now a partner of mine in business. But I heard him talk about these stages. And he described the whitewater stage. And then I went out and got his book and, and listened to it actually as an audio book. And when he described this stage, Whitewater is like, does he have a camera in our office? Like he’s even reading my emails, like, what is going on here? And the first thought that hit me was we’re in Whitewater, right, this finally makes sense, somebody understands where we are. And secondly, the very next thought that hit me, which is kind of weird, I’ll admit is if I could help people get out of whitewater every day for the rest of my life, I would die happy man. And that’s where this really started was, I realized, finally, there was a model that that depicted where we were right, it wasn’t that I had to make that was the moment I realized I didn’t have to figure it out myself anymore. And so I use that model, we also were able to add a million dollars to our bottom line in just one year was 13 months. So nears makes no difference. And from then on, it was just like, Oh, my goodness, like this is this is what I want to do. This is what I want to use. So it’s called the predictable success model. And it really empowers everything that we do. And it goes to the heart of that first issue I talked about of how do you find the root causes? And that’s what it did for us is it address some underlying fundamental issues that everyone felt but nobody could put a finger on. And it gave us the right things to work on in the right order. And and through that structured process, we were able to make just a remarkable transformation. And that’s the same system that I used to teach both founders and coaches.

george grombacher 14:02
Nice moment of clarity. Like, this is amazing. How does this guy know that we’re experiencing exactly what he’s describing? So what is what is the typical engagement look like for, I guess, for the whole thing?

Unknown Speaker 14:21
Yeah. So for, again, there’s two sides of this, right? Because I’m helping both both groups, if you will. So on the founder side, what we do when we work with our goal is to come in and have a transformational engagement. So it’s not one of those things. We do offer ongoing coaching, that’s a supplemental thing. But those are problematic for a couple of other reasons. But we come in and we address the the fundamental issues that are happening at the stage that you’re in right now to get you to the stage that you want to go it’s usually about a six to nine month process. It’s something that you you will likely figure out on your own right founders are dogged and determined and resilient enough to figure this stuff out. But like I said, alone takes a lot Time. And so what could take you 2345 years, right? Is what it typically takes in one of those problematic stages, you can make that progress in about six to nine months with a guide, who can just walk you through the steps to get there. It’s not the trial and error, it’s not the painful losing of leaders that you experience, you know, it’s just a six to nine month process. The way that we typically work is in full day engagements with the entire team, we do a workshop together, and we actually solve the problems right there in the room. It’s not like the typical consulting engagement, where you go through there’s a whole discovery process, and then what’s the result of all of it? Is it solved? No, you get 100 page report that you now have to figure out, we don’t do it that way. We end the day with a really clear action plan on we’ve got the problem solved, here’s how we’re going to act that out and sorted out. And again, over about six, sometimes nine months, we’ve made significant progress inside of the organization. On the on the coach side, what we do is, again, it’s about a 90 day process, and I bring folks in, we train them on the predictable success model, we train them on those lifecycle stages, I talked about the leadership styles that are driving those stages. And then the actual roadmap on how to scale an organization, how do you accelerate an organization’s growth. So I train the individuals one on one, we address the three fundamental problems that are happening to them as coaches, right, which we don’t have time to get into. But there’s a resource that we can point folks to. And and in doing that we also licensed the whole model to them that they can use and it’s turnkey, right? It’s just plug and play as well. Okay, I know what we need to do to solve the problems in your organization is this workshop. Alright, let’s go. Right. And so they scheduled the workshop, and they’re good to go. So it’s really business in a box. It’s meant for both existing coaches and new coaches alike. Both have experienced significant success with the program.

george grombacher 16:54
Nice. Love it. For on the founder side, this six month, six to nine month process. How much time during the week are we typically looking at I’m sure it’s more some weeks and less others. But yep.

Unknown Speaker 17:09
So going through, it depends on what stage you’re in, right, and what stage you’re trying to get to. So there’s seven stages, which means that there’s different approaches for the different stages. But what you can expect is one, we’ve got that full day workshop, which is they’re usually spread out by about four to eight weeks, just depending on your business cycle. And whether it’s a busy season or not a busy season. And what we do early on very early on, one of the very first things we do is actually stop the senior leadership team from doing too much. That was one of the primary drivers of a slowdown in organization is just overload from either the most senior executive CEO, founder, whatever their title is, and they’re their leadership team, which we call T one. And so a significant portion of what we’re doing very early on is actually buying back the space that they need to do the work that they’re supposed to be doing. And so the net result of that, it’s more work, but it’s actually the same amount of work for the team. Because we’ve eliminated a bunch of work that was unnecessary. And we’ve delegated a bunch of work that was not necessary for that team. And we create that space early on so that it’s net neutral, and you actually start seeing momentum after just a few weeks.

george grombacher 18:21
Love it. Beautiful. Well, Scott, people are ready for your difference making tip even though you’ve given us a lot, what do you have for them?

Unknown Speaker 18:29
Yeah, it is that it’s alone takes a long time. I don’t care if you’re a founder or a frontline employee, if you are serious about having a career that fulfills you and excelling in that you can go further faster with a coach, you know, there’s not a single Olympic athlete out there right now it doesn’t have a coach and the same reality is true for us. If we want to be at the top of our game. The best way to do that is to find the right coach for us right now.

george grombacher 18:57
Well, I think that is great stuff that definitely gets come up. Scott, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you and scale architects?

Unknown Speaker 19:08
Yeah, it’s absolutely my pleasure voyage. Folks can find us at scale architects.com If you go to book dot scale architects calm be OK. Dot scale architects calm, we are giving away the predictable Success book for free, and a whole host of other resources about $350 worth of of courses and PDFs and resources that are available. And all you do is pay for the shipping. I think it’s eight bucks, something like that. So book dot scale architects calm. And for coaches in particular, there’s a course in there about how to avoid the three traps that coaches face. And that’s one of the bonus materials that’s there and it’s so for either side. If you’re looking for a great coach, if you are, if you are wanting to be a great coach. That free book is the best place to start book dot scale architects. dot com.

george grombacher 20:01
Love it. If you enjoyed this as much as I did, just get your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to book dot scale architects.com Pick up a copy of the predictable Success book if you’re a coach pick up the information on how to avoid the three traps that coaches fall into.

Unknown Speaker 20:21
Yep, it’s all there. One thing everyone gets all of it so everything’s at booking dot scale architects calm,

george grombacher 20:26
beautiful. Well, thank you again, Scott. Absolutely, my pleasure. And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai